September 13 2026 - The Very Rev. Erika von Haaren, Dean

In the name of the one holy and living God, Amen.

Please be seated.

I was ordained and started my first job as a priest in 2006 at St.

Barnabas in Scottsdale, working for a rector who had a longtime contemplative practice.

He would sit in centering prayer for an hour every morning.

When I arrived there, the very idea of centering prayer and contemplative practice were all brand new to me.

I knew that there were ascetical practices, but hadn't really known anyone personally who followed it so faithfully.

So for the first five years at least that I worked with him, I believed I was not cut out for centering prayer.

I couldn't sit down and be silent without getting distracted after more than a minute or two.

And if I'm honest, I spent many of those years feeling like I wasn't a very faithful or good priest because I couldn't do it.

I wasn't a good enough prayer.

Somehow, finally, after those five years or so, I started hearing my rector preach to try centering prayer for just one minute per day.

That the distractions of our minds are normal, that everyone has thoughts that continue through our mind, and no one completely lets go of them without years and years of practice, which I found liberating.

To imagine that other people struggled with this as I did, and that it was normal to not be able to do this important thing without practice shifted my view.

The secret of centering prayer, or so it seemed, was that you keep returning.

Again and again, even when the distractions come, you return to the practice, return to your breath, return to the silence, and you gently release those thoughts that want to take over, and you return to your intention, which is simply to mean that we practice our prayer.

And with practice, our ability to disengage from the distractions through our silence and our breath, our intention grows, deepening our prayers and eventually lengthening our time in prayer.

It was all about practice.

Today's gospel lesson is a continuation of last week's teaching about how we are to be in community with one another.

And of course, it's as though we can't have any significant teaching of Jesus without Peter blurting out what so many of us wonder or think about as we learn from Jesus.

If someone sins against me, am I supposed to forgive them seven times?

Peter asks.

And I really want to believe Jesus was a little bit playful and said, Oh no, you don't have to forgive them seven times.

Seventy-seven times.

And then Jesus uses this parable to explain that a king forgave a man an enormous debt, one that he could never have repaid in his lifetime.

The king gave this man a life of new freedom that would have been unimaginable in that moment.

But then the freed man walks outside and cruelly tries to claim a debt from someone who owes him just a small amount, one that could be paid back in just a few months.

So what happened?

Why didn't forgiveness beget forgiveness?

Why did someone who had received such mercy not extend the same mercy to someone else?

It feels like a question for the ages because as much as we wish it wasn't familiar, I don't believe that a scenario like this comes as much of a surprise to us.

Perhaps we've even lived out such a scenario in our own lives.

One of the ways to examine this is potentially from the viewpoint of the role that trauma or pain plays in our minds and hearts and nervous systems.

Because even when something great happens, it doesn't cancel out negative things that have happened in the past.

We hold such traumas and fears and pains in our bodies, and often our bodies respond before our minds ever catch up to the feelings that are occurring around us.

So the man indeed had a transformative experience, but walking outside his whole self had not caught up yet with the miracle that had occurred for him, and he therefore falls back into the old pattern of desperately clawing back any money he had loaned to others.

Then there are those who would say that this man was simply irresponsible, that he should never have borrowed so much money nor loaned out any money if he couldn't bear to part with it.

But we also don't know the full circumstances of this man's life.

We don't know what he faced.

Did he lose a crop?

Were livestock attacked by predator animals?

Did a family member grow ill and need treatment?

We so often can judge someone in difficult circumstances without ever really knowing how they got to that place where they are or what hardships they faced.

And it is certainly more common for someone to end up in difficult circumstances by way of a turn of fate than it is by their own fault.

Whether any of these things are true, Jesus makes it clear that forgiveness is an imperative in the life of faith.

So much so that he says those who don't forgive will be subject to the anger of God that can lead to torture unless we forgive from our hearts.

So it behooves us to learn to forgive.

And it appears that forgiveness might also be a practice that takes time to develop.

Because the inclination and ability to forgive changes and morphs based upon our lives and our experiences.

We're all born to a large extent with an innate desire to relationship build, to trust, to hope.

But life and relationships are complicated, and they can prevent us from engaging as purely as we did when we were children.

All of us get hurt sometimes, all of us make mistakes sometimes.

None of us is immune to any of that, nor on the impact they have on our spirits.

So Jesus calls us toward learning how to cultivate this practice of forgiveness.

Did you note that Peter asks, how many times am I to forgive someone if they sin against me?

And when Jesus says 77 times, he isn't saying, forgive 77 different people for 77 different things.

He's saying, forgive that one person 77 times.

Why do we need to keep forgiving them?

Because Jesus knows how hard it is to forgive.

Jesus knows that one and done doesn't actually work and won't be transformative.

Pains and griefs don't just exit our spirits and our bodies and our muscle memory immediately if we decide to forgive someone.

The old fear or anger or hurt or pain will creep back up on us and recycle through our spirits over and over again.

And so we have to go through the process of arriving at forgiveness all over again.

And then they'll creep back up again and again.

In the same way that our minds get distracted when we're trying to be still for prayer, and we have to keep returning to our intention.

We also have to keep returning to our intention when it comes to forgiveness until we have worn a new groove in our spirit where forgiveness feels as common as the pain that was once in its place.

Jesus knows that releasing that pain through forgiveness is one of the ways we are able to bring about the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

That phrase matters in all of this because it was in chapter six of Matthew, 12 chapters ago from where we are now, that Jesus teaches us the Lord's Prayer.

Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.

He's been teaching them the importance of forgiveness all along.

This is the prayer or the hope that Jesus instills within us.

He teaches us to ask him to forgive us just as we forgive our debtors too.

Now that can maybe sound conditional, like God won't forgive us if we don't forgive others.

But the reality is actually the opposite.

God forgives us, and our gratitude and awe at the magnificence of that forgiveness is meant to liberate us to see that we can forgive others too.

The story today is the king forgiving us first, setting the course for this man's life, for our life.

God tries to set the course for us too, because none of us are one and done on making mistakes either.

All of us sin, all of us separate ourselves from God, all of us err.

That is why we continuously ask for forgiveness, particularly in our worship service every week.

We do so together, side by side, receiving the same absolution, because none of us get to decide that any of us are better or worse than anyone else.

We confess and repent together and are absolved of our sin together.

We do this before we pass the peace amongst our congregation, and before we go to the altar where we break bread together, because forgiveness builds a grounding for us to hold our heads up with gratitude as we are nourished at the table of grace.

So seeking forgiveness is to come before him with a sincere heart and with true intent to amend our lives to be more of who we can be because we are loved by him.

Not because we have to be, but because his love inspires us to be.

To be forgiven can change us.

To forgive can change us.

But it all takes practice.

Our natural biological inclination is to do whatever we can to survive while we work through the traumas of this life and the traumas of being human.

And that survival instinct can often look like self-protection in a wide variety of ways, which means the first thing that comes to our mind is not always going to be about forgiving someone else.

It can be and often is, about judging someone else or isolating from someone else, being harsh with our expectations or needs or desperations.

Paul's letter today is clear, though, that another part of being in Christian community with one another is that we have to let others be themselves and we have to be ourselves, and we can't despise each other for our differences.

Which is to say, without it being a sin against one another, we are called to forgive each other for not being who we think one another should be.

Because we're all just humans trying to get by in this world.

And we're all susceptible to judging, to fear, to trauma, to pain.

But if we practice a different way of being, we can find our way toward being more like Jesus in these lives we lead.

And as forgiveness becomes more habitual thanks to our intentional practice of it, it does rise up as a first option instead of a last option, because we have seen and felt and experienced how transformative it is.

The old adage is true.

We can't drink poison and expect someone else to die.

If we hold the unforgiveness within us eternally, it doesn't hurt the other person, it hurts us.

It corrodes our spirits, darkens and dampens our better instincts, and keeps our worlds small.

So forgiveness also heals our souls.

It doesn't just free the soul of the one we forgive.

Now a brief sidebar.

Forgiveness does not mean excusing.

If you are being actively harmed by someone, your safety is first priority.

So we get help, we get out, we do what needs to be done to be well.

Forgiveness can be a step two or three or four after that if you are in danger or being hurt.

You are not being called upon in this gospel to withstand abuses as though our forgiveness of someone hurting them, hurting us will make them stop.

That is different from all of this.

And if you need help with a situation such as this, please come see me.

Sidebar over.

But I'll close with this.

Last week we talked about the goals we have in regard to the culture of Trinity that we want to build toward and continue in our future.

That we want to be grounded in our heritage and in our faith.

That we want to continue an enduring legacy for another hundred years.

And we want to offer radical belonging to whoever wishes it when they come through these doors.

Inside these three things, in unique ways, is the practice of forgiveness.

To forgive ourselves for any errors of the past as we sought to be a faithful community but didn't necessarily get it all right along the way.

To forgive ourselves when we fail in the future as we seek to create anew, and we know that we'll inevitably misstep sometimes.

And to forgive each other when we fail to make space for one another, end up judging each other, and we know we need to do better as a community.

Indeed, forgiveness is at the heart of many of our community's needs and hopes, as well as the world's.

And we can start in this small microcosm of our world to practice forgiveness.

And as we practice, we inspire others to start practicing too, until our ability to forgive far surpasses any hopes we could have imagined for ourselves.

We start small, we keep practicing, and we grow our capacity and our ability and our desire to extend forgiveness.

So if it's hard for you today, you're not alone.

Keep practicing.

Do so for the sake of yourself, this community, and the world.

We're never perfect, nor will we be, but we can always strive forward, knowing that we are liberated by the forgiveness we have received from God and that we get to share that good news of love and grace with the world.

Amen.